Posts by Sgt_Oddball 2335 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jan 2010
Everyone has one, usually a Lenovo but sometimes an M$ surface.
And then some of us got macs... It's used to be because it was outside the reach of the corporate security overlords, these days... It's because they're still more open than the M$ machines to allow us to actually do our jobs (even with WSL we often find dependencies blocked for inane reasons or ports locked because... Well just because) and we can at least justify that they'll last us longer than a windows machine so there's always that.
Is that they've dropped the floaters and instead are laser focused on point to point transmissions.
I wonder what sort of optical correction they'll be adding so it doesn't have a shaky start?
Fine. I'm going. Mines the one with the folding telescope in the pocket.
We just added a Doc/docx and pdf (if we could get away with charging extra) parse and a fuzzy match to a HR CRM system.
There's just so much wheel reinvention going on where the keyword of AI get added as if it somehow makes it better than everything else that's gone before because it allows the users to be even more brain-dead than before.
And don't even get me started on Microservices Devs...
To what one my app dev guys was looking for (he's one of the few people in the office willing to having a weirder Android device Vs everyone else just getting an iPhone) the other day.
He was after a Linux distro to run on his pixel (he has to settle for the pixel as staff options removed the nothing phone and before they added the TCL nextpaper which got him all excited such is life) purely so he could a decent terminal in a VM.
Being able to have a terminal is a boon for those of us who have to test kit, with terminal scripts being a huge time saver for switching configs between tests and actually trying to use the damn thing as a phone.
I can wholeheartedly agree. We tried to get council contracts from time to time but the sheer effort involved in finding the tender requests and stupid requirements/hoops to jump through to prove that yes, we were capable of providing a simple CRM package for one sports centre got ludicrous to the point I was sure the requirements were written by the tender winners just so only they could take the contract.
Smaller companies who can't afford to take councillors out for steak dinners every other week don't stand a chance for these things (despite being more flexible and able to bend over backwards to accommodate the effective, cost efficient implementation of their own package, safe in the knowledge that other councils will crawl over broken glass to get it once a package is proven good).
I just wish big tech firms would listen to us telling it where that place is rather than trying to shoehorn it into every feature, facet and function as an excuse to do something with all the data they've hoover up.
(Anyone promoting AI should be required by law to explain the difference between data, information, knowledge and wisdom without resorting to a dictionary or online searches).
Mines currently down for the count as batteries have become... Problematic to acquire and despite best efforts of getting a stupidly big PSU (wattage wise) from the bin'o doom at work it's not coming back round. Which is a shame as it was great for doddling on as the graphics tablet side always worked great.
I'd seen another project previously to put new internals in but missed out on getting one at the time.
With a modern CPU?
Be still my beating heart (I personally prefer the X200T keyboard, but the X220's isn't too bad).
I'd be more excited by that than having RISC-V...
Unless... AmigaOS maybe? (Sudden pondering on the bizarre possibility of ThinkPad keyboard, modern inputs/screens etc and AmigaOS.. in a portable form factor)
Sounds like my old boss. He used to swear... A lot... Only the once directly at me (he was also an ex town crier so most of the office floor heard him) but often on group calls would occasionally be picked up on other live mics muttering after muting himself.
On the flip side, he trusted his Devs and backed me up rather than throw me under the bus in my first work production f-up.
Still the best person I've ever had the honour of working under.
(Megaphone icon because he didn't need one)
But the thing is.... It is possible to do. On a shoe string budget no less without getting a bunch of gullible fools investors by building the sort of thing a customer wants. Eddison Motors having done just that, they've done a retro conversion, then a new build prototype (it goes, it tows, it's in heavy testing now with warts and all being recorded because you can learn from failures), they're making money building portable lighting rigs and actively engaging with a small number of customers to work on further concepts once the prototype has proven itself (by concepts we're not talking pure haulage trucks, but utility vehicles - cement mixers, logging trucks, bower trucks etc etc).
They've also built it as a diesel electric - which at the end of the day the generator can run any fuel you like and is more there to ensure it can always move.
The contractor in question works in partnership with a rather large network in the UK... And spun the tech off their highly mobile, mobile cell towers (runs out the back of a L200 pickup so they can drive it up a mountain if need be).
So licencing of the airwaves isn't a problem for them. I was disappointed though the the SDR kit was some off-the-shelf Dell rack mount servers. All solid-state drives though so less issues with vibration.
Really good idea for managing devices over a wide area but not so large than regular networks would be preferable.
A good example was for music festivals, hand all vendors their own sims so they can accept card payments on a dedicated network, run video/audio over dedicated networks. All on some that won't be completely borked because of abit of rain or having the APs saturated because different vendors are trying to use WiFi for other none transaction data.
Generally for such boxes you make sure it's in a room that does not see a cleaning lady(or man, such things do exist). Secondly, the box might come up just fine but that doesn't mean the attached servers will automatically play nice, seeing the boxen mit blinkenliten immediately and carrying on their merry way.
Sometimes, you have to restart things in a specific order. Usually the order is passed down in arcane rites by grey beards in locations where the sun dare not shine. Sometimes you get lucky and just have to remind the servers that things exist again.
I've been there a few times, even more fun having UPS's ripple start only to have one release the arcane smoke thus causing further embuggerance after a lengthy power outage.
So not a developer then? The fun and games moving from Intel macs to Arm macs has been..... Interesting what with getting installers to work, rosetta to behave other misc stuff.
That said, fine once done and I'm still shocked at being able to work for a day in the office without worrying about bringing my charger with me.
What about works that are out of print? Or rare versions with forwards/notes by interested parties?
Or for literature that is no longer in fashion but culturally relivent, or even heaven forbid has been altered in new editions in some meaningful way because the contents are no longer agreeable?
What of those from closed publishers? Whilst, yes... I will admit there is a certain amount of overreach, the sheer breadth of archived material is valuable in of itself especially when other archives aren't perfect (such as the service manual for a 20 year old CRT I own. Pdf versions OCD scanned the docs and used a random not available anywhere font for the parts list. IA had an actual scanned copy - no missing text).
Compromise and nuance should be agreed rather than tearing it all down. Especially things like the way back machine.
We're getting to actually having an ACE Combat game become a reality... We've had shooting balloons, shooting satellites, ghost of ***** for an ace pilot, short range ground to air missile runs, and now we've got robot/AI controlled planes...
Life imitates art in weird ways sometimes.
(and yes I know I know it's a weird series but the plots in some can be really fun - AC:5 is a notible example as is AC:7 - we don't talk about 6..... Or Assault Horizon. Though that's drawing parallels as well)
Own the issue, admitted it was human error due to procedural omissions and stated they'll make changes to remedy it from happening again in the same manner. They haven't said the fix was completely wrong, but that how it was applied, was.
If anything this actually gives some confidence in them and right now seeing the engineer punished wouldn't be worthwhile. If anything I'd say said engineer is now more qualified than any other to address similar incidents going forwards.
All in all, well done Cloudflare for putting this out there.
Teacher icon because every day is a school day.
For fuel, its on hydrogen... As the article mentions.. Several times.
At any rate it looks to be easier to deploy than the current mobile cell towers (basically a flatbed truck with a bunch of server racks, a radio mast, a generator and four wheel drive to go up the side of a mountain).
I wonder if the private cell network system could also be run through this?
To those complaining they over-engineer, it's difficult to build a piece of equipment to last until the day the warranty expires when you're only building one or two of the type.
Now, if there was a mass produced, off-the-shelf, multi-config satellite that's cheap to launch....
Then yes. But when running a team for 30 years still costs less than building and launching it then overeengineering it is.
Look, can we not have mining vessels in space using reactors? I mean, we all know what happens when you scale this up and end up having a Cadmium II leak caused by bad welds from a maintenance engineer.
No good will come off this I tell you.
Mines the leather one with the Ace Rimmer fan club patch...
No, but can you play Crysis on it? (because, obligatory).
On a related note I wonder how many instances of some game (say Doom because you can run that on anything) you could run simultaneously? I'd assume some kind of raised seating would be required but it'd be fascinating to see how many could be reasonably played in parallel...
The nozzle vectoring I'm well aware of, it was more the forced air over control surfaces bit when it's not in normal flight mode. I vaguely remember something about adding air to prevent stalls at low speeds to increase lift over control surfaces and this just sounds like a modern take on that.
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